Those Across the River

by Christopher Buehlman

  Crows were cawing loudly all around. One walked around near us, quite fearless, looking like a tiny Burgermeister in black velvet pants. I offered her a hand to help her stand, but she shook her head, trying to smile though her face was puffy and red from crying and her eyes were too wide.

  “I can’t move just yet, Frankie, okay? I just need to sit here until I have enough strength in my legs to get up and then I’ll help. I’ll help, I swear, just not yet, okay?”

  “Shhh,” I said. “You don’t have to do anything. Shhh.”

  I squatted down and held her head against my chest while she reached her shaking hands up to touch my arms. I held her head against me and kissed the top of it for a long moment and then I allowed myself to look up at what was happening.

  People had war faces on.

  Everything seemed tilted.

  The men of Whitbrow had their sleeves rolled up and shirts tied around their faces so they could breathe while they hauled them out. More men were coming, saying “Jesus” and “Lord” and “I just don’t believe this,” and after each man said these things, he would roll up his sleeves, too, and find something to put over his face.

  I put my shirt up over my nose without knowing why, but when I peeked in I was glad for the shirt, even though it wasn’t enough. Tyson was there in the schoolhouse. What little there was of him. Raw and picked-over. Crows on him.

  He was not alone.

  Paul Miller was there, too. Bloated. Wormy. Coming out of his suit. There were others.

  It was hard not to be sick.

  Someone had exhumed the dead of Whitbrow and tied them sitting upright to the chairs behind the tables. Twenty of them. Some of them recent, some very old; the parts of these that would not bend had been broken off and placed beneath the chairs.

  Dora had seen this, and past the shock I felt a shiver of rage that someone had left this for her to see. She told me later that she fought a small battle with the crows to get them out. She had done this with a branch she pulled from a young tree outside. It had not been easy to convince the crows to leave that room of plenty, but she managed better after she broke one’s wing and then killed it.

  It was then that she saw the writing. I looked up now and saw it. It was on the front wall behind where she stood to teach. It had been written in dark, moist earth above the blackboard. Like a lesson for a dead class.

  SEND THE PIGS

  I steadied myself on the desk and saw the muddy footprints on the ground. People had done this in their bare feet. Men, but also at least one woman or larger child.

  This was so deliberate, and so deranged. I was mad. I used my anger to push myself off the desk, roll up my sleeves and get to work. There would be an awful lot of work for the dozen or so who had answered Estel’s call on blind faith. There was the removal of the dead. There was the placing of them in their boxes; these had been found stacked in a copse of trees not far away. There was the hauling of the dead back out to the cemetery. There was the sorting out of which bodies went in which holes; many of the older ones had to be guessed at. There was the shoveling under. Last came the cleaning of the classroom.

  Many of those who helped got sick, but most continued even though their heads were light and their stomachs bounced. Pastor Lyndon did not speak as he worked. He became ill when, in the close heat of the classroom, the arm of a woman who was buried in 1910 came off in his grip and she fell.

  “This is just the shell,” I heard him mutter to himself. “She has gone home to glory and left the husk behind. This is not her, it is not. She is with God and she sings.”

  He had to run outside then, but he came back. Most of those who had to run outside came back, although a few did not. Pastor Lyndon worked as hard as any of us. When we got the dead back to the cemetery, some of my fellow townsmen looked as if they were waiting for the good reverend to speak. When we put the last one beneath the marker and tamped the earth down, many were no doubt hoping Pastor Lyndon would give them some words to seal the matter. To tell them it was done and they had done good work and they should endeavor to keep their faith while God tried them. Since he did not, but only wiped the grime from his brow like the rest of them and sat down among them, some closed their eyes, and I have to wonder if they were making up his words for themselves, perhaps something about the Philistines or the false prophets or the trials of Job.

  Someone asked Old Man Gordeau if he was going to run the dogs after whoever had done this.

  “Cain’t,” Old Man Gordeau said, his voice tight. “Sons a bitches burned em up. Roasted em right in the kennel. Goddamn them to hell.”

  “You don’t believe in no hell.”

  “I’m ready to build one to put them sons a bitches in.”

  “You see em?”

  “I don’t know what I saw.”

  “Sounds like you saw somethin.”

  “You’ll think I was shinin.”

  “What’d you see, Gordeau?”

  “Long hair. Some skinny-ass white woman with long hair. And a bare bottom, too. Least I think so. But she was gone so fast I’m not sure. I’m gonna put em in hell.”

  And then he walked off and stared at the ground with his hands on his hips. He spat and watched it fall from his mouth. I had the curious idea that this was what he did instead of crying.

  We sat around for some time with our muscles throbbing and our heads and stomachs sorely grieved, and then Sheriff Blake stood up to speak. He removed his hat, and for the first time I noticed how unflatteringly he was going bald; how much older and weaker he looked without his hat.

  “If everyone could gather in and listen before you get to your homes. I know you’re tired. We all are, I guess. I want you to go home and get what rest comes to you tonight, and say your prayers and amens real good. Cause tomorrow, come mornin, right at sunup, I want all men who can handle a gun to bring their weapons to the town square. I know some of y’all got dogs, but leave em. We are goin into them woods past the river; we are goin quiet and we are goin in force. If there is squatters in them woods, we gonna find where they livin and give them some. I ain’t takin no badge this time, neither.”

  His voice sounded sure, and he had said the right words, but he rubbed the front of his pants while he spoke.

  Many of the men nodded.

  “You damn right,” somebody said.

  THAT NIGHT I had a Dan Metzger dream.

  My dreams about the war come in several varieties, none of them pleasant, but some of the worst ones involve the death of my best friend, Dan Metzger, because they’re not just frightening; they’re heartbreaking. I can shake off the fear of death; I can even shake off the guilt of killing; but when I wake up from losing Dan again, I’m all hollowed out inside. I had such a dream one of the first times Dora spent the night, in my tight little bachelor’s apartment in Ann Arbor. I kept it together until I got to the kitchen, but then I cried for fifteen minutes after I broke a coffee cup. It says a lot for her that she didn’t run for the hills.

  In this most recent dream, the shell walloped us and there we were crawling around, looking for his glasses, and him all busted up. Then some doughboys came and buried him right then and there, and I was trying to explain to them that his mother was going to be mad at me. What’s more, it wasn’t fair that Dan was in the hole because he never hurt anyone. Dan got his nose broken for telling on older kids who tortured a frog. Dan aimed up and shot over the Germans’ heads. Dan just wanted a wife who was nice to him, even if she wasn’t smart or pretty, and he was owed that. They just shoveled.

  I woke up with Dora shaking me.

  “Honey, honey,” she said, but so tired herself that her eyes weren’t open.

  “I had a dream.”

  “I know, my love. You’re home now.”

  “Did I shout?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did I say?”

  “You said, ‘Leave, go, let him up.’ ”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  I NEVER GOT back to sleep,
then I decided that was all right and I got my service pistol out of the desk drawer and took it downstairs to oil it. When I say I took it out of the desk drawer, I should specify that I mean the desk drawer in the office, not the drawer of the nightstand. Eudora didn’t like guns in the house, but she was willing to tolerate them as long as the sanctity of the bedroom was respected. I had balked at that initially, but when she pointed out that I might wake up wrong from one of my nightmares and mistake her for Kaiser Wilhelm, I conceded.

  It was good to clean the .45. It was good to keep my hands busy rather than dwell on what had happened the day before, or to consider the prospect of going into those woods. Drop the magazine out. Slide the rack back and check the chamber. Turn the bushing. Then say “goddamnit” under my breath when the spring pops the spring plug loose and it hits the kitchen floor. I was on my hands and knees looking for it with the oil lamp in my hand when I remembered looking for Dan’s glasses in the dream, and I wanted to curl up and sob, but I pushed that down and found the plug.

  Several men were standing around in the town square when I got there at first light. Someone raised a hand to me as I approached and I saw that it was Buster Simms. People were standing near Buster because he was so big he made them feel better, as though he were too big to be hurt or to let hurt come to those who stood with him. His size made the lever-action rifle he carried look like a toy. I shook with Buster and Buster’s hand closed around mine like the larger of two nesting dolls. His grip was strong, but he held strength in reserve. Paul Miller used to shake hands putting some extra squeeze in it so it was clear who the bigger man was. When Buster shook he reined it in a little, as if the other man had offered him some fine porcelain thing that might crack if borne down upon.

  Estel Blake came now and stood upon a bench so everyone could see him and he could see who had come. It was getting light enough to see the color in faces.

  There were more than he wanted here. He sent Old Man Gordeau home because he had a bad cough, and Gordeau fought him on it until Estel pointed out that his hacking would make it impossible to get the drop on anybody. He sent home a young widower who had kids, and he tried to send Saul Gordeau home with his daddy but Saul wouldn’t have it.

  “Now, Lester here is twenty and one and that’s alright, but you ain’t but seventeen and this might get rough. Probly it will.”

  “Reckon it already has,” Saul said. “Sons a bitches burnt up my dogs and dug up my daddy’s uncle.”

  He said it just like Old Man Gordeau would have and it got a yellow little laugh out of them.

  “I’m just sayin you’re young for this and it don’t set well with me.”

  “Sir, I might be young, but I don’t shoot young.”

  I noticed the rifle Saul carried was an American Enfield, the doughboy’s rifle. My old rifle. Bolt action, six shots, deadly, deadly accurate in the right hands, and, since 1918, cheap. I later found out that no fewer than nine households in Whitbrow held copies of that rifle. After the war, a man in a navy peacoat had come around and sold them out of the back of his truck for ten dollars apiece. Harvey at the Drug Emporium had one, but never shot it. Hal the butcher kept his slung under the counter. It was the gun Tyson Falmouth had carried when he went to check on the pigs.

  Saul looked like a child, but he was only a little younger than I had been when Uncle Sam had stuck an Enfield in my hands and nearly shut me in a coffin.

  I had only been a passable marksman.

  Not Saul.

  Estel Blake assessed the slight blond boy who was standing with his feet planted, holding the big rifle like it was part of him.

  “It’s true,” Lester said. “He’s better’n I am or ever will be. You remember that rabbit he hit on the run when we went huntin last year. You were joshin him how it was luck, but I’m here to tell you it wasn’t.”

  “Alright, young man,” Estel said. “But if you change your mind out there and want to get on back, there ain’t no shame.”

  “Same goes for you, Sheriff,” Saul said.

  We left.

  We numbered fifteen.

  “WE’RE LOST.”

  “We’re not lost. I know I seen that before.”

  “Knowin you been somewhere before and knowin how to get back is two different things.”

  “Well, when did we leave the path? When was the last time someone saw somethin they knew was on the path?”

  “Hour ago we seen them pine trees with the cuts in em.”

  “Yeah. Hour ago.”

  “Now, what is this? Anyone know if this has got a name?”

  “Won’t be hard to remember. Looks like that leanin tree is a ole man tryin to push that big rock uphill.”

  “Alright. We’ll call this Uphill Rock. Let’s keep walkin straight east. Frank, keep tight on that compass.”

  “Sisyphus.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Sisyphus. He was condemned to roll a big rock uphill every day, and when he got it to the top it would roll back down and he’d have to start all over again.”

  “Seems like I know that feelin.”

  “What was that fella’s name again?”

  “Sisyphus.”

  “Think I’ll just call it Uphill Rock if it’s all the same to you.”

  BUSTER SIMMS BROKE up a big, round wheel of corn bread his wife had made and handed some around to the ones closest to him, myself included. I was quickly sorry I took it because my mouth was too dry to eat it. Walking armed through the forest with a party of armed men, not knowing when there might be gunfire, was driving me apeshit. I had one foot in these Georgia woods and the other back in the Argonne. Birch trees reminded me of the birches there, with their tops missing and caked in mud from shellsplatter. I was straining to listen for sounds I was no longer capable of hearing; branches snapping, hushed words in German, the cocking of a weapon. I rubbed my hands on my pants and looked around, wondering if anyone could tell how hard my heart was beating. Nobody seemed to notice.

  It was mid-afternoon now and the others were tired and hot and ready to see anything that would break up the routine of marching forward through these woods.

  I hoped we wouldn’t see anything.

  My anger at those who had desecrated the dead and traumatized Dora had been eclipsed by barely containable feelings of panic and a strong desire to sprint out of these woods for good.

  I felt that we were being watched, but then I second-guessed myself and reasoned that it was just the memory of that feeling kicking up silt. Gooseflesh went up my left side as I remembered what had been watching me the last time I was here. Jesus, was I just as scared of that creepy boy as I had been of stumbling into a machine gunner’s sights? Maybe. Even with a party of armed men around me, I didn’t want to see the boy with no pants again. Not ever.

  But there was no way I was turning back.

  The watched feeling got more urgent.

  I went up to Estel Blake and put my hand on his arm to get his attention. His arm was tensed and stiff like wood.

  Estel turned and whispered something to me; I saw his mouth make the words I know.

  He had heard something. I now sensed how tightly wound the others were and knew that they had all heard something. They were jumpy. And they were bunched up.

  I touched Estel’s arm again.

  “Get these men in a line,” I whispered.

  “What?”

  “Put these men one behind the other and space them out before they shoot each other.”

  Estel nodded and went from man to man until it was done.

  But we went on like that for a long time before anyone fired a weapon, and only one of us saw what was in the woods.

  IT WAS MAYBE half past three when we discovered the bones of the horse. The horse had died some time ago, and my first thought was that perhaps we had stumbled across the battlefield; that this was one of the many Confederate horses who died beneath or on top of their masters that day in 1864, its topsoil perhaps washed away in har
d rain. But the ground here was high and the topsoil well anchored by roots. And this horse had been eaten. The smaller bones had been cracked open and the marrow licked out. I saw the scowls on the other men’s faces and knew that my face was expressing the same contempt. There’s something in a man that loves a horse and hates to see one desecrated.

  The sheriff was the most affected, and I can only venture that the sight of those gnawed bones reminded him too sharply of the boy he had so recently found beneath the locust tree. He muttered something to himself, or so I thought until I saw by the way he closed his eyes that he was remembering his Psalms again.

  “What the hell is out here?” Lester said. “That ain’t no dog. Dogs did not do that.”

  “I don’t know,” Estel said, “but we gonna find out.”

  He said it, but nobody believed him. Nobody wanted to meet what made those deep grooves. Not in his heart. Not if he was honest.

  About four o’clock something moved and several men shot at it. Estel stopped them and they watched the smoke clear and several of them went in that direction to see what they had hit.

  “What are you doin? Dammit, get back here!” Estel said, but they went anyway.

  The brush was thick and soon the men were out of sight.

  “Hey!” Estel said, but stayed where he was and the remaining men stayed, too. A long moment passed.

  “Where are you?” a voice called.

  “We’re here!” the sheriff said. “Follow my voice.”

  “Here-here-here-here!” Buster said.

  “Keep talking,” a voice said.

  “Here-here-here-here-here!”

  The men came back and rejoined the group.

  “Did you see anything?”

  “Nothin.”

  “Who shot? Lester, did you shoot?”

  He shook his head.

  “Well, since you know how to keep your britches on, you and me are goin to walk up front. How about you, Mr. Nichols? You fire?”